I've come to the conclusion that I'm a compulsive eater. Somewhere along the line, hunger uncoupled itself from my eating behavior. I eat for any other reason: boredom, stress and just because it tastes good. It's not that the choices of what I eat are bad (usually...there are the mini chocolate bars in the snack closet at work), but once I stop eating I find it very difficult to stop. This is of course a current curse of our culture as well. So, I know I'm not alone here.

Recently, I had the good fortune to meet a woman named Ellen Glovsky. She is a registered dietician and expert in teaching Motivational Interviewing (a counseling method oriented toward helping people make behavioral change). She is also a big proponent of a Health At Every Size approach to diet. I hired her to come in to do a training for our staff on MI and at the end of the day I bought the book she edited, Wellness Not Weight. It was a real eye opener.

The scientist in me was drawn to the explanations of the enormous amount of research demonstrating that traditional approaches to diet don't work. The social observer in me was drawn to the historical perspectives of how our culture's approach to weight and diet developed. The Buddhist in me was drawn to part of the solution - mindful eating (a.k.a. Intuitive Eating).

I'm sure that many of you, like myself, have gone through the Jon Kabat Zinn observe the raisin before eating it mindful eating exercise. While it was interesting, I can't truly imagine making a practice of being so sensor ill tuned into my food as I eat it, particularly as I would rather be mindful of my family at dinner time. This mindful eating was different, however. This mindful eating asks us to tune into the cues our body is giving us in the present moment to guide when, what and how much we eat. 

As I've observed my behaviors over the past couple of weeks and tried to observe my body cues, this has turned out to be harder than the raisin exercise. The irony is, the more I try to think about whether or not my body wants food and what it wants, the more I think about food. The more I think about food, the more I want to eat. It's a conundrum. Clearly, the key is going to be the ability to apply Don't Know Mind or even No Mind to the situation. But how? 

Fortunately, I have a couple of private sessions coming up with Ellen to help me with this. In the meantime...raisins! Mmmmmmmmm!


[Disclaimer: no I have not received any free goods or services (or raisins) in exchange for this post.] 
Photo: WikiCommons - Cary Bass